Keeping up with the blog

Summer tends to be extremely busy with the garden, so we don't always have time to sit down and write down things we would like to post about. To try to catch up, let me see if I can briefly describe what we've been up to.

Front yard is all planted and we're seeing what works best for next year. We continue to do crop rotation in the front to maximize our return in produce and to keep bugs and disease to a minimum. We also incorporate a ton of companion planting to see if that will help our yields. We have two chickens who make it out to the front in a fairly regular basis. Although they have ravaged one of my strawberry beds (and ate all the potatoes) they are keeping the slugs, snails, and rolly pollies down to a minimum, which is working well for me. The chickens are being trained to go up front, lay their eggs, eat some bugs, and then hurry on to the back yard. We'll see if this works long term. In the front we have, berries, grapes, apples, mint, lemon balm, strawberries, rosemary, sage, savory, comfrey, watermelon, cucumbers, pumpkins, melons, sunflowers, popcorn, corn, onions, potatoes, garlic, almonds, tomatoes, basil, peppers, and chives growing. We had a fabulous run on berries this year, with three of us going out and eating berries every single day in June and we were still able to make some berry scones and ice cream. I'll expand the berry section next year to double it's existing area as well as planting additional plants along another fence. Our goal is to have so many extra berries that we can actually make jam and maybe some berry mead.

Talking about mead - my italians flew off and in my despair I did not take the boxes down in a fairly timely manner... which only worked to my advantage since the boxes were then populated by a local wild swarm and they are working fairly hard to build up their numbers.

The backyard is thriving as well, but as it turns out this is a much longer post than I originally thought and I'm tired and need to repeat my day tomorrow.. Good night all!

In the pictures we have - Sungold tomatoes, buckwheat, squash, strawberries, and popcorn with a golden melon flower peeping through.